For those who find themselves awed by arid landscapes, there’s no place like Africa.
The continent boasts nine separate deserts, including a vast Sahara that sprawls across much of the north, the rust-colored Kalahari of the southwest, and the bizarre Turkana Basin of northern Kenya.
All of them have unique origin stories about the Earth forces that created their incredible terrain and tales about the people who have long inhabited some of the planet’s driest, hottest, most inhospitable spaces.
For modern visitors, Africa’s deserts offer romantic settings, striking landscapes and a variety of outdoor adventures that reflect the unique personalities of each place.
Here are eight different ways to discover desert Africa:
Trek some of the world’s tallest sand dunes (Namibia)
Even Salvador Dalí couldn’t have rendered a landscape this surreal — lurid orange dunes towering more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) above a ghostly forest of dead camelthorn trees and bizarre, almost perfectly round, “fairy circles” that some people attribute to alien visitors.
The place is called Sossusvlei in Namib-Naukluft National Park in the middle of what researchers consider the world’s oldest desert — formed between 55 and 80 million years ago when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.
In the language of the local Nama people, the name Namib means “a place where there’s nothing.” But nowadays there are plenty of ways to explore the park’s iconic dunes including horseback rides, 4×4 tours, helicopters, hot-air balloons, and trekking to the summit of sandy rust-colored monsters like Big Daddy, Dune 45 and Dune 7 (tallest of them all at approximately 1,273 feet/388 meters).
